Help me teach my Director

[Frank Barrera]

I am about to shoot my first feature. It will be with the Varicam. I have worked with the director before on film and he has a fantastic eye and a flair for low key dramatic lighting. BUT with this HD he is convinced that the best way to go is to light everything flat and then do what he wants in post. After he told me this last night I tossed and turned. 4 weeks of my life shooting crap with such a great script in hand will be torture.

 

I need some ammunition to argue that we should get the look we want in camera and perhaps tweak later, not the other way around. Does any one have experience with this debate? I need clear solid technical reasons. And some recent Feature or TV examples that were NOT heavily posted. My intuition is not a good enough reason to light it like film.

 

Help me...

 

Thanks in advance.

 

Frank Barrera

[Keith Mottram]

Tell him the varicam doesn't have the resolution, nor the color space and is too compressed to handle a heavy grade. Now a 'balanced' lighting setup would allow for a flexable aproach to grading. If its flat doesn't matter what system your using to grade you'll never get the image back (10bit full HD, would give more post options). I know this from experience as a effects artist/colorist as well as a director (and as an ocasional DOP).

 

keith

[David Mullen ASC]

Tell him that it's always better to light the image close to the look of the final product because (1) he's an artist and artists make artistic choices, they don't cover their asses by leaving it up to post; (2) the compression of DVCPRO-HD does not lend itself to extreme changes in color and contrast; (3) sorry, but you can't realistically add shadows to flatly-lit material, even if you are ILM, let alone an indie film. You can come up with some sort of stylized unreal shadows but it looks better to do it for real on the set.

 

If he doesn't believe you, don't do the project. Let him find some hack DP who doesn't care and will just flat light everything and let the director sweat it out in post.

 

It doesn't hurt to SLIGHTLY use more fill light to a scene because you can "crush" some of that shadow detail back down again in post and it looks better than the opposite, trying to lift information up in post. But I'm talking about being subtle -- you still need to have your key light and your shadows in the right place.

 

I'm sorry, but if you want a dark room with half-lit faces, then flat lighting the whole room and actors and hoping to turn it into a dark room with half-lit faces in post is, well, idiotic. "Garbage in, garbage out" -- this rule still works in the digital age. Get it right on set and work on IMPROVING the image in post. Don't shoot crap and then try and make it acceptable in post when you could have shot it right to begin with.

[Nate Downes]

Too many shoots these days opt for a flat look, and there is little that can be done in post. Shoot, how many movies nowadays look the same as sitcoms in their lighting? It's rediculous.

 

That's it, I'm taking away all of your video cameras and forcing you to shoot it all on 16mm B&W clockwork cameras! 8)

[David Mullen ASC]

Plus I would add that the time it would take in post to add shadows to every frame would end up costing you more than what it would have to just created the shadows on the set. How long does it take to light a face from one side with no fill versus lighting it from all sides and then painting in a shadow side in post? And why is it preferable to make that artistic choice in post and not on the set? Staring at a bunch of flat-lit dailies for months during editing could affect your perception of the scene if it was meant to be dark and moody, plus you have nothing to show people that looks remotely like the final product.

 

I've sometimes had individual dailies retransferred if it is too far off from the final look, even knowing that I could just wait until answer printing to fix it --- because once the editor and director gets used to the incorrect look during the months of editing, it can be hard to get them to change the look back to the correct one.

[John Sprung]

I need some ammunition to argue that we should get the look we want in camera

The best approach is to sell this visually. Get the post house to give you a free hour of testing with a colorist, and take your director to that session. Find or shoot some test material that demonstrates the fundamental fact that if two areas are different, you can make them more or less different. If two areas are the same, the digital boxes have no way of making them different unless you go at it "by hand" with power windows.

 

When you get that lesson through, move on to the more subtle limitations of making small differences bigger. You can get more shadow on a face, but at the cost of making it look like a topographical map.

 

Finally, if you get that far, demonstrate shooting with crushed blacks and blown out whites versus crushing and blowing out in post. Your current problem is that he wants to go with not enough contrast. The danger is that you might move him from not enough to too much.

 

All gray you can't fix. Everything either black or white you also can't fix. You can move things around, but the farther you need to go the more trouble and danger you make for yourself.

 

Someone who really knows PhotoShop could probably do this whole demonstration on an ordinary desktop computer much like the one that's showing you these words. ;-)

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Mitch Gross]

John has the best answer. My political way of handling lame-brain ideas like this are usually along the lines of, "Interesting concept. Let's shoot a test and try it out to see how we like it." I've killed more insanely complicated concepts this way while being able to sqeeze in a little bit of my own testing for other purposes.

[John Sprung]

Get the post house to give you a free hour of testing with a colorist,

BTW, if the post facility is at all reluctant to give you the free time, tell them "We really need to get this director educated about this, because if we don't, he's going to make a very serious mistake and blame it on you." (People tend to place blame not at the point where the problem is caused, but rather at the point where the problem is discovered.)

 

If the "and blame it on you" part doesn't get their attention, you need to talk about finding another post house -- one where you're an important customer, not just a little nuisance job. At a big post company, it's usually best to take that kind of request to the top. Your individual account rep may not have the authority to say yes, but the boss does. And the boss is also much more concerned about the "and blame it on you" part. ;-)

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[chrisM]

He might be a bit technically astute for this but you could give him a monitor and show him how to adjust brightness and contrast. Then tell him anything he can do on the monitor he can do in post. He'll fiddle until he gets the picture he likes, (confident that he can do it later in post) and you can shoot it the way you want it to be.

 

Don't laugh, I've done it and it works.